


As We That Are Left Grow Old

by halotolerant



Category: Foyles War
Genre: Other, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007, recipient:lakester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-29
Updated: 2010-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thank you to elfwhistletree for (another) brilliant beta</p>
    </blockquote>





	As We That Are Left Grow Old

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to elfwhistletree for (another) brilliant beta

  
  


  
  
  


 

  


## As We That Are Left Grow Old

 

Fandom: [Foyles War](http://yuletidetreasure.org/get_fandom_quicksearch.cgi?Fandom=Foyles%20War)

 

Written for: lakester in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge

by [halotolerant](http://yuletidetreasure.org/cgi-bin/contact.cgi?filename=43/aswe)

Thank you to elfwhistletree for (another) brilliant beta

 

It has been months now since the floral clock on the Hastings seafront was watered. The man - or maybe it was more of a boy - whose job it was has long up and gone to war, and no one has come to replace him.

 

Turning away from the forlorn brown remains of the tulips, Christopher Foyle leans over the railings to gaze at the beach, at the sand girded round with barbed wire.

 

Beyond, the sea is the grey of a jam jar of painting water. The pure white crests of foam are thus in a way a miracle, a reminder that nature throws out beauty as easily as anything else, and Foyle lets himself smile a little. It heaves, this body of water, writhing and undulating like a lover or a dying man - and there, Foyle smiles again as he catches himself in the simile, because of course those two ideas run together in his head easily as vinegar and salt.

 

Sting the same, as well.

 

He moves his gaze a few degrees up, to where the coast of France lies just over the horizon. Almost near enough to wave to, there is enemy. Or at least some of him. Or at least some people are.

 

Foyle runs a hand across his face and grimaces at his own incoherency. It has been a long day. It has been a long life. It has been a long war.

 

Some people find it terrifying that this sea is all there is between them and their attackers. Looking down at it now, Foyle thinks, you could believe that it was a crowd of people charging the shore, a roiling mass of men, surging forwards and falling, breaking in waves as they reach their destination. You could believe this, but Foyle will not let himself, because association betrays memory as surely as an unintentional flinch can betray guilt.

 

Unexpected circumstances, of course, can make mockeries of all our good intentions. Rex Talbot is a fresh occurrence, something of the uncontrollable `now', not the well-worn over past. His power to call up what should be buried is more than Foyle knows he can rebut.

 

That Rex was the person who had caused Connie Dewar's death had come as no surprise, not because Foyle had particularly suspected it, but because he had long ago stopped letting himself be surprised by tragedy. That the death was an accident, well, many were.

 

However, that she had been in an emotional frenzy because she had discovered Rex's homosexuality and love for Foyle's own son? That was surprising Foyle even now, less than a day after discovering it.

 

Less than a day after Rex's own death.

 

"He was a good man" Andrew had said, weeping out the news, which even now Foyle recalled with a kind of wonder and horror together.

 

If Foyle could want one thing for Andrew, it would be not to be like he himself is. Not to see what should not be seen, not to understand things that ought to be hidden. Not to know the best and worst of other people.

 

To be blind to what terrifying and wonderful things the world could be.

 

Even to be blind to love, if it was the kind that could bring such pain.

 

He'd reassured himself that Andrew had not guessed and would not have wished to know of Rex's feelings. Now he wished only that he might have offered something, anything, to Rex beyond the blessings for a final, suicidal mission (although all RAF exercises could be that), before inevitable public humiliation.

 

Men should not be alone in death.

 

And the memory arrives in a wave, crashing down, swamping Foyle for a moment in fear and trembling and taking twenty years hard-earned experience from his mind like skin flayed from a body.

 

\- - -

 

The first battle of Ypres, although then it had not been `the first', merely `the battle' - the idea that such a thing might happen again having then still been on the cusp of the unimaginable. Ypres, 1915, and after an advance the twenty-one year old Foyle had become hideously lost and fallen into a bolt hole that was more like a mud pool, only to discover he shared it with a German soldier.

 

They had been trapped there for almost thirty six hours.

 

Cold. It had been more cold than anything, mud that crunched with ice up to their knees and smeared all over them, rain so heavy it seemed to collapse from the sky. The battlefield had been silent and dark and neither of them could have known which line they'd ended up behind or if indeed they were in No Man's Land.

 

The conversation, when it began, had been tiny. Few mutually understood words and nothing much to say to each other.

 

Henrik - he gave his name as Henrik Bielbaum - had been in some kind of pain, something that had made his pale eyebrows twist together and his mouth hang open and pant. Their vocabulary had not even stretched to where this pain originated or how exactly it felt, though there'd have been nothing more to do for him if it had.

 

It had been perhaps twenty-six, twenty-nine hours into their time together when Henrik had died.

 

But before that, long before that, he'd crawled closer to Foyle and kissed him, softly with cold lips and mud in both their mouths.

 

"Ich...I have not..." he'd murmured, gesturing between them. "Never."

 

Foyle had never, either.

 

It had been magnificent and terrifying as staring up into the sky at night, realising that everything or possibly nothing was before you, that meaning lay somewhere in a unwieldy shape within it and that to ever understand it would require being bigger somehow even than what you beheld.

 

Can you love someone for all the rest of their life on so little? For all the rest of yours?

 

If love amongst the hateful attrition of war, rises in a small and impossible miracle like white foam on a wave, is it better to smile or to reject it?

 

\- - -

 

Foyle braces himself on the railing, making the cold iron strike into his hands and slice into the memories, because it is done and gone, another part of himself buried so that the future might happen as it should, and if that future is Andrew, flying planes and losing friends, well, he does not have to piece that thought together.

 

Foyle knows that as he gazed into the abyss that day in Ypres, the abyss had gazed back, revealing something lovely in its dark and miring crevices, and ever since then he's struggled to find reason and order in anything at all.

 

Horror and joy, love and hate, twisting in a torque together, with nothing as simple as `them' and nothing as safe as `us'.

 

Like Rex, letting himself die because he loved, as Shakespeare might have put it, not wisely but too well.

 

"Beastly day" says a voice behind Foyle, abruptly cutting into his thoughts.

 

Andrew.

 

"Cold enough." Foyle turns, shaken from his reverie and confused by it as the recently woken.

 

"You were supposed to meet me at five." Andrew inclines his head toward the pavilion, where the sign `TEAS' still stands as optimistically as it did in 1925.

 

"Sorry. Lost track of the time." Foyle walks forward. Andrew's eyes are red, though of course that may be cold.

 

"I was just thinking" Andrew says, with a small smile and a sniff - of course, that may be cold as well - "Of how we used to walk here when I was small, and I'd ask you why the floral clock was a clock if it didn't have the time."

 

"Ah, yes?" Foyle smiles briefly. He does not remember that. He was probably thinking of other things too much then, as well.

 

Andrew steps up to the railing, gazes out to the sea and then up at the sky. Yes, his son's demons will come from the sky, not the ground - that is the effect of twenty years of progress.

 

"Rex was the first..." Andrew swallows and starts again. "I've lost friends before, of course, we all have, but not..."

 

There is a pause. He taps the railing with his finger.

 

"Someone you loved?" Foyle supplies eventually, tone level and indifferent.

 

Andrew turns sharply, "Yes. And Rex didn't have a lot of people, you know, he wasn't close to his family and Connie, even before she... He used to say I was his family. I'm glad, I suppose, that it does hurt me. It was right for him to have been torn away, ripped from someone. Not just...gone. If a man dies he ought to be screamed for." He ducks his face and blushes.

 

"You may have a point, there." Foyle rests a hand gently on his son's shoulder. He would like to hug him. He would like to be able to express how proud he is, and maybe how regretful that Andrew has had cause to find these truths out. But he does not want to explain it, does not want to recall his own revelations any further.

 

His generation, after all, sacrificed their lives and livelihoods for Andrew's, not to make them hurt again reliving it but to save them from it all.

 

Andrew will never understand him, if any of Foyle's prayers come true.

 

Foyle takes his hand away. "That floral clock is not what it was" he points out, communicating everything and nothing by it, and heading off away from Andrew towards the pavilion.

 

He hears Andrew's footsteps, following in his own behind.  
  
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End file.
